Word: fallacy
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...ORIANA FALLACI has made a name for herself asking questions of others. Her unmistakeable voice has been heard, over the last five years, in the Italian magazine L'Europeo, in the New Republic, in newspapers around the world, interviewing public figures in politics and the arts. Her newest book, Interview with History, (recently translated into English) collects some of these controversial conversations--Fallaci's interviews have caused uproar on at least three continents--into one volume organized around the theme of the leader in history. The book contains 14 of the interviews Fallaci bagged between 1969 and 1974; on exhibit...
Cosmopolitan praised the book as a marvelous gossip column. But Fallaci claims it is much more; she describes the work in its preface as "a document straddling journalism and history." In fact, her art--and this kind of interviewing is an art--claims the prerogatives of both, yet accepts the responsibilities of neither. As a result, her methodology and the material she gathers raises a lot of questions...
...following is an interview with Fallaci, in which she responded to some of these questions. Held in my imagination, the Fallaci-style discussion took place in a hall of mirrors. In every pane you could see the diminutive, dynamic--her whirlwind manner is famous--Italian, reflected from a different angle. I can't say for sure I ever say her, in all the fragmented images and quotations. But Fallaci was not distressed when I told her this at the end of the interview; she does not believe in objective reality. She repeated what she had said in the preface...
...extreme example of a very common psychological problem among Italian men: "il mamma-ismo." For Pasolini the situation was intensified by the fact that he never loved another woman. He was repelled by women's bodies and pregnancy filled him with horror. As he wrote to Oriana Fallaci: "I don't want to know what's in a woman's belly. Motherood disgusts me." Pasolini cultivated masculinity; he exercized every day, kept himself strong, virile-looking, tough. Yet he wanted to play the woman in his sexual encounters. Socialized into a completely dominating role, the Italian male may often fantasize...
...lived them. Magnified by his artistic sensibility, these problems become universal Pasolini's neuroses were Italian versions of man's traumas. The alienation of birth, the love-hate dialectic of sex, the conflict of principles and suppressed desires; these are all part of the angst of human existence. Oriana Fallaci, and other friends of Pasolini, have said he wanted to die, and to die the kind of violent death he did. Certainly the abyss fascinated him. He sought the dangerous, the sordid, with passion. He loved New York because he saw it as "a war you go to to kill...